We made our way south, the cool water warming with each mile covered. I’d later learn through checking satellite maps that we were swinging by seal colonies of the coast of Southern California, the Channel Islands to be exact. Being pregnant takes a lot of calories to maintain I guess.

Blue, or so she called herself, and I spoke of many things on that voyage. Once I was recovered enough, I swam beside her, watching her hunt. I learned to take tuna, seals, yellowjack and developed a taste for that and lobster tail. My presence let her sleep without fear in the depths where one current met another, so she was better rested than many other sharks when we arrived at a small rocky island with green hills.

Our voyage took us past many Californian cities, and I voyaged onto the darkened beaches at night to search for supplies. I was happy enough eating fish but I’d need clothing if we stumbled upon humans. The land dwelling humans were sloppy and soon enough I’d managed to find a water-tight backpack, flashlight, first aid kit, and a variety of energy bars. I stowed it all into the backpack and strapped that tight against my back, my tendrils fanning around the sides. I avoided all the cellular devices, worried I could be tracked by those that created me.

I was still scared of being taken back. After seeing the stars close enough to touch over open water, eating fresh food, how could I go back to being a lab subject? Turns out those fears were well founded.

Blue had gone to hunt as the seals made their way into shore from hunting at sea and I preferred fish to mammal meat, so was in shallower water hunting yellowtails as they hunted smaller fish. My body was coiled on the bottom, waiting for the perfect moment to launch, when the fish scattered as dynamite exploded in the water.

I cried out in pain, the noise muffled by the water as I began to swivel my eyes around. My ears were near useless and I guess that’s what they wanted because they hit the water shortly after a second round of dynamite made the water around me shudder. A dozen men in ebony dive gear, spears guns in their arms plunged into the water in a neat circle. The silhouette of a helicopter was above me, blades turning as men jumped from it.

Rage shook me as I noticed all the dead fish and a tiger shark around me and I launched myself through the forty feet of water and into the air above me. You’d think they would have taken the chopper higher after dropping off the hunters but I guess the pilot hadn’t read my latest physical challenge reports. I knew how to explode out of the water and seize a ball fifty feet in the air. The skid rail of a chopper at fifteen feet was easy to wrap hands and two tendrils around. To launch myself into the back where a gunner was stunned at my presence. He had time to yell an obscenity before I punched him full force.

I did not know skulls could explode… no, I’m not describing that. I did horrible things to stay free. To avenge the lives they’d taken just to take me back. Not even to eat, just a byproduct. I killed everyone on board and launched myself free of the chopper before it plunged into the water. A piece of blade nearly scalped me as it flew by, the water slowing it enough for me to move. I lost a few pieces of hair but was otherwise unscathed. That left the dozen in the water.

My distress, my rage, had called in other predators, from bull sharks to a small pod of orcas. I try to send them away, but I don’t know how to do that yet and they ignore me. I slide through the water with a grace to match theirs as we circled the men with spear guns, those that weren’t hit by the chopper or its shrapnel.

I feel Blue slide past me to circle around a man with a yellow stripe on his arm. She stays out of range of hit spear gun, fainting at his back to make him panic. I join her, circling opposite her, drawing closer with each pass. She faints in hard and he whirls, ready to shoot. I dart in and tear the regulator from his tank. Then off comes the arm holding the spear gun, floating to the surface as a gargling scream pours from him. I feel no remorse, but no pride either. These divers with their clunky breathing equipment and easily torn limbs are no match for the orcas, sharks and I.

They’re torn apart but not eaten where avoidable, my order on that at least stands. Humans would send out boats of fishermen if any parts were eaten. If these bodies were found and the public notified. I took two of the spear guns, extra spears and two more dive knives from the corpses. Waste not want not and given they were wearing the logos of the company that made me, I would have thought they’d come better armed.

I thanked and rubbed the sides of every one of the predators that surrounded me, a strange truce amongst them as they coiled around me like a cat would have. (There’s a cat colony on the island near where the pups and I stay, so I’ve had it happen.) A few had wounds that I couldn’t fix but would heal soon enough on their own. My last goodbye was to the orcas and by then we had drifted miles south. Blue had remained behind to eat the dead yellowjacks and tiger shark, much to some of the other shark’s dismay. Her size alone guaranteed no sass back though and she fed in peace.

The orcas, energized by the unfamiliar, raced around me as I played with them. I guess we were all getting the last bits of adrenalin out of our systems. I stayed carefully under thirty feet, the water above me murky and sheltering. The dive watch I scavenged said it was nearly half an hour before Blue rejoined me. She was full enough to continue south and after the attack, I didn’t argue.

I remembered that the guards back in the lab had laughed at an exec who was pissed at the Mexican government. Apparently, they wouldn’t allow company search teams in to extradite a run away scientist and had told him to go fuck himself. There had been a river the company had “tested” a new species of fish in with disastrous results for the entire ecosystem. Mexico hated the company with a passion, I’d heard. I hoped they still hated the company enough to keep them out of Mexican waters.

What other choice did I have but to hope?

The orcas kept us company for a couple miles before peeling off to swim back to their channels, chattering in their own language about the day. Blue gave a fin twitch similar to a human’s roll of eyes and took us into deeper water beyond the coastal shelf. It was waters she had never seen a human diver in and I was inclined to agree it was probably safer in.

My mind raced through the next few days, wondering how did they find me? Did I still have a tracking device I hadn’t found? If so, why did it take them over a week to attack? Why wait for shallow water? What would they send next? A submarine?

I asked Blue if she could sense any electrical pulses with her senses, far more attuned to such things than mine. She said there wasn’t anything beyond my heart and the thrum of electricity that any would expect from a god-child. It wasn’t exactly reassuring until she told me that she had followed the beep of trackers when hunting smaller sharks and dolphins before. If she could hear them well enough to hunt then I hadn’t been found by tracker.

I was nibbling on a lobster tail when it occurred to me. I’d been near the surface enough and probably had been spotted by a surveillance drone. The company would call it field testing if asked probably. But no one would have asked. I’d been using my tendrils to swim with and had probably made an easy target to find when eating surface fish or swimming with dolphins or orcas.

I sighed and laid my head on Blue’s back. She was carrying me as we powered south. Apparently there had been enough food to keep her stomach full for another week, even carrying me when I had to rest. My ears were still ringing when I fell asleep that night.

Neither of us rested much for the next three weeks, bodies constantly swimming. I was exhausted by the time we made it to a sunken boat near an island that Blue said was full of fat seals, its waters full of smaller fish and crustaceans. I didn’t bother eating before climbing into the cabin of the sunken fishing boat. The walls provided shelter as I fell into a deep sleep, my bag dropping to the floor as I let it slide off.

I was exhausted but a glance at the boat’s charter with my flashlight showed it was licensed out of Campo Oeste, Baja California made me sigh with relief. We were much further south than I’d realized after all and all that much safer. I could hear the distant songs of grey whales on their annual migration and it serenaded me to sleep.

Sea Gods preserve me, this was rough to write out. I still feel no grief over those human hunters. They went after prey far beyond their abilities. They killed innocent animals with no plan of eating them. They were collateral damage, nothing to be worried about. Not even the endangered giant sea bass.

I haven’t seen anyone from the company since then and even began to make brief shore trips on foggy nights only, collecting more clothing and gear to add to my dry bag. I even found a group of comic books featuring a hero in New York. I kept my finds with me, though the bag was clunky sometimes. I’d drop it to the bottom to hunt but kept it with me incase we had to bolt again.

I hadn’t seen any drones though aircraft overhead would send me darting for deeper waters. Even commercial airliners at first, though as the weeks wore on, I grew less jumpy. I began to recognize the sounds of the fishing families and their boats as they left the shores of Isla Guadalupe. I’d smile at the children though they couldn’t see me in the water made murky by nutrients and currents.

I was out fishing myself, chasing a school of yellowtail (they’re my favorite, not sure why) when I felt the weather change. I surfaced enough to take a peak at the horizon and felt a trill of alarm. There was one of the fishing boats and I could hear the distressed cries of children inside as it bobbed in the increasingly choppy water. I moved closer to the boat, knowing the two children were crying to their father to go faster as their grandfather kept bailing out water that was coming over the sides.

I felt the shift in the water and saw the larger waves before the people on the open boat did. I hear the men shout as the wave crashed over the boat. I was closer now, my heartbeat faster as I looked for the children. I saw the boy’s head rise above the rim of the boat, sputtering but the girl wasn’t there. She bobbed once above the surface and let out a yelp before being dragged down by another wave. I was diving after her, tendrils helping steady and propel me in the turbulent water.

Her bright pink blouse made her easy to see as she was pushed down by the waves and I grabbed her with both hands. She flailed weakly in my arms as I raced for the surface but it wasn’t a struggle to get away. I broke the surface and screamed at the waves around me to calm down, water draining from my own lungs as I dragged in salt-laden air.

I had pushed the water from her lungs and blown more air into them before I realized what happened. The boat was making for us through the rolling waves. But for about five meters around me in any direction, the water was as placid as a sunny windless day. The girl took in a gasping breath as the boat entered my placid circle. Her eyes were wide in terror as she coughed and started to plead for her papa. I held her at the surface and waited for the boat to reach us.

“La sirena,” the men shouted at me before seeing my tendrils. I was using them to tread water, legs pumping as well. They gasped but their hands were eager to take the crying girl from my arms. She was alive and safe with them again. The grandfather met my gaze as I smiled at the father holding his daughter tightly, giving thanks to various saints that she was safe. That the sea had brought her back.

The grandfather bowed his head to me. His voice was rough with years of work on the ocean and I knew enough Spanish to understand him. “Thank you, she is our only girl in three generations. God bless you… whatever you are.”

“Just your friendly neighborhood water spider,” I quipped. “I’ll keep the waters as clam as I can, but hurry into your bay. I can’t stop the big waves well.”

“Water spiderman,” the boy said, staring at me with wide eyes.

I dived back under the water, letting the cool water flood into my lungs and felt air bubbles flash past my gills before the water did. I stayed with the boat until it was safely in the bay the fisherman called home for part of the year. I felt battered and sore by the time I was done, the effort of keeping the water calm enough for the boat to make decent time having exhausted me.

Blue, fat with impending birth, collected me and did that smirking fin flip. “Silly pup, tiring yourself out.”

“Didn’t mean to,” I retorted. “I wasn’t thinking. And they mean no harm, they don’t use nets.”

She gave a shrug and took me to the sunken boat to collect my bag. “It is time to head to the birthing grounds.”

“I’ll miss you,” I told her, wrapping my limbs around her in a hug. “I’ll keep your pups safe, I promise.”

“Silly as you are, it may be they who keep you safe,” she responded wryly.

Maybe they would, I thought as I curled up on her back for the last time. But I’d make sure they were safe too, I promised to the ocean at large. Anyone messing with my dear ones would pay dearly. And indeed they would.